SURVEY: Vitamin B-1 / Thiamine

Four years ago, a group of Italian researchers noticed that the fatigue in patients with ulcerative colitis improved after therapy with high doses of thiamine. From that they formulated an hypothesis: “Chronic fatigue that accompanies inflammatory and autoimmune diseases could be the clinical manifestation of a mild thiamine deficiency, probably due to a dysfunction of the intracellular transport or due to enzymatic abnormalities, and responds favourably to high doses of thiamine.”

From that point on, they began searching for diseases in which chronic fatigue was a significant symptom and treating those patients with high doses of thiamine (vitamin B-1). Last year they published their very successful study “High-dose thiamine improves the symptoms of fibromyalgia.” Reportedly, they've observed similar improvements using high-dose B-1 with ME/CFS patients, however, those results have not yet been published.